Highway of Drugs -- A special report.; Opium Finding Its Silk Road In the Chaos of Central Asia

By MICHAEL SPECTER

Published: May 2, 1995

OSH, Kyrgyzstan—
Compared with the mysterious bazaars that brought wealth to this Central Asian region more than 2,000 years ago, when exotic spices and precious bales of silk were ferried on the backs of camels, the market here seems pretty tame.

Old men sell sugar from the trunks of rusted cars. Women gather bread in the folds of their skirts, and the smells of grilled lamb fill the air. But something else is going on here in southern Kyrgyzstan these days, something communicated mostly in quick nods and furtive glances.

Osh is rapidly becoming the best place in the world to buy opium, the hub of a newly resurgent Silk Road, perhaps history's most famous highway. The route that wound for 5,000 miles from China across vast steppes, through the mountains of Afghanistan to the open ports of the Mediterranean has now reopened for a compelling reason: Despite halting efforts to interrupt the traffic, the route now carries an ever-growing caravan of drugs through the damaged, lawless and often ungovernable countries of Central Asia.

Propelled by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, economic and political chaos, civil war, borders that cannot be controlled and the aggressive anarchy of Afghanistan -- which many narcotics experts now estimate is quickly becoming the the biggest grower of opium in the world -- this rugged, often unassailable region has become the ultimate drug runners' dream come true.

"What is happening in these countries is a nightmare," said Victoria Goh, deputy director of the United Nations Drug Control Program's regional office in nearby Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

"There are hundreds of little mountain passes and roads that cannot be guarded," she said. "There are almost no effective borders. There are no incentives to stop the traffic, only incentives to start. And the confusion and poverty in this part of the world is so great that I don't see any way anything is going to improve soon."

The tide of drugs sweeping across these struggling new countries presents major problems not just for them, but also for the European countries that have become the destination for the opium grown here. And as bad as the drug problem has become, the political troubles they cause are worse.

Indeed, the opium pouring out of Afghanistan has not only affected this region, but has also worried politicians in the world's largest heroin-consuming nation, the United States.

At the same time, crackdowns elsewhere have only added to the region's drug problems. Pakistan and Iran have recently started to get tough on poppy growers and heroin manufacturers, thereby diverting the river of opium, and turning Central Asia into an even more essential transit point for the thousands of tons that are produced each year.

On the new international drug highway, all roads seem to lead from Osh. Fewer than 300 miles from the Afghan border, and less than a day's drive from each of five other Central Asian countries, the city has become the bustling dispatch point for routes that spin north toward Russia, east to Asia and west to Europe, through the legendary city of Samarkand, where money was once measured in ounces of silk, not in tons of opium.

The economics of this mostly Muslim part of the world are stark. The average monthly salary for a working man in Kyrgyzstan is about $35, half what a boy of 10 can earn in a few hours guiding a horse laden with drugs through a mountain pass.

Raw opium has quickly become a bread-basket commodity in this rural land of 4.5 million people: farmers can swap 20 pounds of flour for a rich chunk of opium the size of a jumbo chocolate bar. It can also be bartered for peanuts, canned goods, cooking oil, lamb or cognac.

"I have replaced every one of my officers," said Bakerdin Subunbekov, chief of the Osh police, which must fight the flood of drugs and corruption in a city of 500,000 with three Russian-made jeeps, a few guns and one walkie-talkie.

"I picked the new men myself," he said. "They were trained in secret. They are 29 good honest men, but they earn $45 a month. They have families. You can figure out the rest."

A pound of pure opium gum -- available to anyone who shows an interest -- costs less than $400 in the Osh market, much less for shoppers willing to buy in bulk. The same amount costs three times as much in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, which may help explain why it is sold openly there by senior members of the police force.

The price nearly doubles again when the opium arrives in Samarkand, hundreds of miles away in Uzbekistan. By the time the opium reaches its main destination in Moscow, where it is often refined into heroin, it costs at least $5,000 a pound.

"One look at a map and you can see it all," said Henry Lee Clarke, the American Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which has the toughest drug laws in Central Asia. "This problem is beginning to get out of control. Those drugs are mostly grown in Afghanistan. But they just can't get where they are going unless they come through here." The Economics Drug Business Is 'What Works'